PERSPECTIVES

september 1, 2012 vol xlviI no 35 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 44

This article is based on the Keynote address
given at the conference on After Subaltern
Studies held at Princeton University,
27-28 April 2012.
Partha Chatterjee (pc281@columbia.edu) is a
founder member of the Subaltern Studies
collective.
After Subaltern Studies
Partha Chatterjee
As an intellectual project,
Subaltern Studies was perhaps
overdetermined by its times.
Given todays changed contexts
the tasks set out by it cannot be
taken forward within the
framework and methods
mobilised for it. Subaltern Studies
was a product of its time; another
time calls for other projects. An
exploration of what Subaltern
Studies achieved, what remained
unasked and unrecognised and
what has changed in the historical
context to necessitate new
intellectual project(s).
I
t has been some time that people
started talking about After Subal-
tern Studies. In fact, if one thinks of
the coming and going of intellectual
fashions, 30 years is an unusually long
time for a school or trend to stay in or
around the limelight. In the half a century
or so that has passed since I rst became
aware of such things, I have seen the rise
and demise of existentialist philosophy,
structural anthropology, structural-func-
tionalism, modernisation theory, struc-
turalist Marxism, history from below,
d ependency theory, world systems theory,
postmodernism and deconstruction; there
must have been a few other trends that
were once in vogue but I cannot now
recall. Many are unaware of the fact that
I was present at the birth, more than
40 years ago, of rational choice political
t heory and participated in it with some
diligence, if not enthusiasm or conviction.
So it is neither a matter of surprise nor
of sadness to engage with the subject
After Subaltern Studies.
Nonetheless, it is not an elegy that I
will offer. Instead, I will argue that sev-
eral of the questions raised by Subaltern
Studies have been neither dismissed nor
properly answered, while others are only
now beginning to be addressed. The task,
as it now stands, cannot, I think, be taken
forward within the framework of the con-
cepts and methods mobilised in Subaltern
Studies and certainly cannot be carried
out by the original participants in that
project. What is needed is not an exten-
sion or reformulation of Subaltern Stud-
ies; what is needed are new projects.
The Project and Its Time
It has often been observed that Subaltern
Studies was a product of its time. Speak-
ing at a meeting of the Latin American
Subaltern Studies Collective in 1993,
Ranajit Guha said:
Our project belongs to our time. It made its
debut at a time of turbulence marked by the
difculties that faced Indias new nation
state, by acute civil disturbances which
threatened occasionally to tear it apart, by a
common anxiety in which the frustration of
the Midnights Children born since Inde-
pendence blended with the disillusionment
of older generations to produce an explosive
discontent...
He also added (2009) that this time of
Subaltern Studies was also thoroughly
overdetermined by global temporali-
ties. The period from the mid-1960s to
the early 1980s was indeed such a time
of churning and it had its effect on our
intellectual formation. More specically,
however, if one thinks of the role of
specic networks of scholars and insti-
tutions that produce innovative arguments
or approaches in particular scholarly dis-
ciplines at particular moments in time,
then we must remember, as Dipesh
Chak rabarty (2011) has pointed out
recently, that apart from Ranajit Guha,
those of us who rst came together to
launch Subaltern Studies were all young
in the 1970s. This had several implica-
tions for our work even though we were
not necessarily conscious of them at
the time.
First of all, we brought to our work a
certain nave eclecticism that allowed
us, as it were, to hunt and gather in the
forests of scholarship in several discipli-
nary as well as geographical regions.
Having received our formal degrees from
many different universities in at least
four different countries, we had the
great advantage of not owing allegiance
to any established school of history
writing and thus were free to strike out
on our own. Our individual fancies
sometimes acted as encouragements for
others; at other times, they were kept
in check by their disapproval. In my
own case, for instance, given my early
association with the Calcutta variety of
Marxism, I was deeply sceptical of struc-
tural anthropology; it was at the prodding
of David Hardiman and Shahid Amin that
I began to read Lvi-Strauss seriously.
On the other hand, while several of
my colleagues were great admirers of
E P Thompson and the Annales variety of
popular history, especially Le Roy Ladurie,
I preferred for a long time to stick to
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Economic & Political Weekly EPW september 1, 2012 vol xlviI no 35 45
Althusserian structuralism to which I
was unable to convert the others. Later,
when Dipesh Chakrabarty turned to a
serious reading of Heidegger, many of
the others resisted.
Testy Debate
What this meant, however, was the
opening up of a space of vigorous, sus-
tained and sometimes testy debate with-
in the group. We usually had one annual
meeting of the editorial group where we
discussed one anothers ongoing work
over two or three days. The discussions
frequently ended up in heated debates
over philosophical or methodological
positions. After one such session held in
the guest house of Hamdard University
in Delhi, I remember a somewhat bewil-
dered Gautam Bhadra remarking that he
felt he had been watching a game of
world championship table tennis where
the rallies were so fast and furious that
the spectators frequently lost sight of the
ball. The reason why these full-throated
debates never led to acrimony was also, I
think, that we were still young enough
not to have developed deep personal
stakes in the positions we took or the
company we kept. We could disagree
wholeheartedly and still belong to the
same somewhat beleaguered group
called Subaltern Studies.
The third implication of being young
was our ability to endure and survive
not only the intellectual criticisms which
came thick and fast but also the many
institutional impediments we began to
face as we continued our collective work.
We had almost no institutional funding
for our research, and when we attempt-
ed to hold conferences in India under
the name of Subaltern Studies, we re-
ceived no cooperation, and sometimes
open hostility, from institutional author-
ities. We took the bold decision to hold
our conferences and editorial group
meetings independently, without any
i nstitutional support, by using the royal-
ties from the sale of Subaltern Studies.
I remember that we paid second-class
train fares, stayed with each other or
with families and friends, charged partic-
ipants for cyclostyled copies of papers
(this was before bulk photocopying
b ecame affordable) as well as for lunch
unthinkable in Indian academic con-
ferences. Our enthusiasm could only
have been sustained by friendships
among the young. Dipesh Chakrabarty
and I have also agreed that it was a dis-
tinctly male circle of friendship that
could have given the early Subaltern
Studies its particular character. It, of
course, had the unfortunate consequence
that there were no women in our edito-
rial group, leading to the g laring omis-
sion of the subject of gender in the early
volumes of Subaltern Studies. By the
time we responded to the legitimate
criticism on this score by bringing wom-
en members into our group, Subaltern
Studies was no longer in the same em-
battled and indigent condition as before.
The fourth consequence of our youth-
ful enthusiasm came from the fortunate
guidance we received from Ranajit Guha
who, of course, belonged to a completely
different generation. Perhaps remem-
bering his own chequered career in the
academy, he curbed and steered our
e xuberance by constantly reminding us
that despite our political predilections,
we would have to carry on the ght
within the academy. Hence, we should
neither expect, nor indeed should we
a llow ourselves, any relaxation of the
technical standards of scholarship with-
in the discipline. In other words, no mat-
ter how radical our historical claims, we
must scrupulously follow every accepted
professional norm and not let anyone
a ccuse us of shoddy scholarship. Even
when we made methodological depar-
tures, using unconventional sources or
reading documents in unprecedented
ways, we would have to defend our
i nnovations by deploying the best possi-
ble theoretical arguments. I sometimes
think that this is one of the reasons why
Subaltern Studies took the course it did
after the initial barrage of criticism it
faced over the portrayal of the subaltern
rebel as the new sovereign subject of his-
tory. Like many radical movements in
the past, we could have dug in our heels
and insisted that that was the radical
p olitical core of our project which we
would never abandon, no matter what
our academic critics said. Instead, we
chose to embrace the criticism, work
alongside it and formulate far more
n uanced positions. This meant that as we
passed from youth to middle age and
beyond, we not only stayed in the acad-
emy but were able to branch out individ-
ually to take up other intellectual projects,
many of which were deeply informed
but not limited by Subaltern Studies. It
also meant that instead of being cor-
nered into a derelict ghetto, we actually
prospered in the academy.
Changes over Three Decades
In order to correct the impression that
I am focusing exclusively on the so-called
subjective factors concerning our own
biographies, let me also mention that
the objective conditions within which
Subaltern Studies was located also
changed drastically in the last three
decades. In the years following the
Emergency, when Subaltern Studies was
born, we were thoroughly convinced
that the political order in India lacked
foundation in popular consent and that
the facade of electoral democracy would
be thrown aside once more should it be-
come inconvenient again for the rulers.
The insurgencies in Punjab and Assam
in the 1980s and the state response there
only strengthened our suspicion. Yet
when economic liberalisation came in
the early 1990s, it did not have to be
imposed by authoritarian means. Some-
thing had clearly changed in Indian
politics. Greater and greater sections of
the people were developing a stake in
the governmental regime and becoming
aware of the instruments of electoral
d emocracy as a means to inuence that
regime. The arms of administration
were reaching deeper and wider into
d omains of everyday life hitherto un-
touched by government. At the same
time, corporate capital was gaining a
p osition of unprecedented legitimacy
within urban civil society, displacing the
status once enjoyed by the postcolonial
developmental state.
The image of the subaltern rebel so
meticulously portrayed by us now
seemed like a throwback to the days of
the British Raj a construct that histori-
ans of colonial India might nd useful
but one that would be of little help in
understanding the contemporary Indian
peasant. We now saw that the latter
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september 1, 2012 vol xlviI no 35 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 46
would have to be u nderstood within a
new framework of democratic citizenship
complex, differentiated, perhaps fun-
damentally a l tered from the normative
ideas of citizenship in western l iberal
democracies, but nonetheless c itizen-
ship, not subjecthood. Subalternity would
have to be redened.
Errors and Corrections
Chakrabarty (2011) has recently begun a
discussion of the unintended but gen-
erative mistakes of Subaltern Studies.
Referring, in particular, to the heavily
structuralist depiction of the rebel con-
sciousness in Ranajit Guhas E lementary
Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial
India (1983). It is a depiction that has
been criticised by many precisely for its
insistence on a singular structural form.
Chakrabarty speaks of the portrayal of the
peasant rebel in the early Subaltern Stud-
ies as one way to construct a genealogy
of the mass-political subject in India
that emphasised the presence of the
archaic in the modern. The phenomenon
of the crowd as a distinct political pres-
ence, whether in orga nised demonstra-
tions or riots, or in the electoral waves
of post-Independence India, certainly
carried distinctive traces of collective
practices that were much older than the
Indian Constitution. Chakrabarty (1989)
himself showed this very effectively in
his study of the industrial working class
in Calcutta: despite the strenuous efforts
of left-wing organi sers to instil in them
the modern habits of class conscious-
ness, workers in the city apparently never
quite stopped thinking and behaving like
peasants. Subaltern Studies contained
some of the most persuasive demonstra-
tions of the truth that the time of colonial
and postcolonial modernity was hetero-
geneous, that its practices were hybrid,
and that the archaic was, in many signi-
cant ways, constitutive of the modern.
But the so-called mistake as well as its
generative potential need, it seems to
me, further consideration. An example
Chakrabarty often cites is the common
phenomenon of the little gallery of gods,
goddesses or godmen displayed above
the dashboard of a bus or truck every-
where in India. The practice of display-
ing sacred images to bring success or
ward off bad luck is undoubtedly archaic,
even though some of the deities or
godmen may actually be of fairly recent
vintage. Hence, to discover that this
practice is now intimately connected to
the operations of such a modern con-
traption as a motorised vehicle is un-
doubtedly a signicant revelation about
the archaeo logy of Indian modernity.
However, we should not, for that reason,
forget to n otice that there is nothing ar-
chaic about the materiality of the images
themselves, for the pictures have been
probably produced by a large offset
printing press in Sivakasi and the little
Narayana or Ganesha gure that lights
up every time the brakes are pressed
was probably made by a toy manufac-
turer in China. Indeed, there is a serious
case to be made that these practices of
contemporary bus or truck drivers in
India are i ntimately shaped by the cir-
culation of industrially mass-produced
sacred o bjects. Hence, while there is
undoubtedly a g enealogical trace of
older practices in the phenomenon that
Chakrabarty des cribes, the practices them-
selves, even in their material embodi-
ment, are part of the technologically
nurtured modern.
The question, therefore, becomes: What
was true, and what indeed was wrong,
with the formulation about the insur-
gent peasant? Clearly, we can now sort
out more precisely than we could have
done in the early 1980s the archaeo-
logical sediments of heterogeneous time
in the collective life of peasant societies
in contemporary south Asia. We may
also be able to trace more exactly the
many lines of genealogical descent
through which these collective practices
have acquired their current shapes.
Ranajit Guha was also right in insisting
that it was not a question of drawing the
faces in the crowd, as the radical social
historians of France or Britain might
have suggested, for his case was that the
insurgent peasants of colonial India
were political not in the sense of the
i ndividualised bourgeois citizen of libe-
ral democracy; they were mass-political
subjects whose rationality had to be
sought in the collective life of the pea-
sant community. He found his answer in
the structure of rebel consciousness
which he located, in turn, in the struc-
ture of the peasant community.
Now, there were several criticisms
made of Guhas answer that entirely
missed the point. Surely, the insurgent
peasant as mass-political subject did not
exhaust the entirety of peasant life;
there was indeed a great deal that this
structural explanation of peasant poli-
tics was not meant to illuminate. Most
importantly, the everyday reality of sub-
ordination, with its attendant ideologies
and practices containing elements of
submission as well as intransigence, still
required specic analysis and explana-
tion. Thus, James Scotts (1985) demon-
stration of the many weapons of the
weak was undoubtedly a reminder that
even acts of insubordination in the every-
day life of peasants could not be clubbed
together and explained by some invari-
ant structure of rebel consciousness.
I ndeed, the fact that episodes such as
the ones highlighted by Scott require
separate analysis was demonstrated
brilliantly by Guha himself in his essay
Chandras Death (1987). Chandra was
no insurgent peasant, but she deployed
the meagre resources at her command
to mobilise the help of her female rela-
tives and ght against the oppressive
patriarchal order in the only way she
could: the result was her tragic death.
Whether her act was political or not
might be a matter of debate. But it is in-
disputable that she did not represent the
mass-political subject in colonial India,
and that is what the structural analysis
of rebel cons ciousness was intended
to explicate.
Subject to Citizen
The question that has become impera-
tive in the last two decades is whether
this gure of the mass-political subject
in India needs to be redrawn. My view is
that it does. The deepening and widen-
ing of the apparatuses of governmenta-
lity has, I believe, transformed the quality
of mass politics in India in the last two
decades. A crucial element in the struc-
ture of rebel consciousness in colonial
India was the location of the state and
ruling authorities outside the bounds of
the peasant community. This structural
element of externality explained several
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Economic & Political Weekly EPW september 1, 2012 vol xlviI no 35 47
features of negativity that characterised
the actions of the insurgent peasant. But
now that the activities of the govern-
ment have penetrated deep into the
everyday lives of rural people and affect
matters like the supply of water to
their elds or electricity to their homes,
or the access of their villages to public
roads and transport or to the facilities of
schooling, public health services, public
distribution of subsidised foodgrains or
kerosene, and employment in public
works, or indeed to such novel necessities
as the registration of lands and houses
or births and deaths, should we not ex-
pect that even mass political action will
no longer be characterised principally
by the marks of negation that Guha
demonstrated so elegantly in his classic
work? I think that the transformation is
actually visible in much of recent mass
politics in Indias chaotic democracy.
Since I have made this point at length in
some of my recent work (Chatterjee 2004,
2011), I will not repeat my arguments
here. But I should point out what I think
is at stake in recognising the change as
one that calls for a paradigmatic shift on
our part. For the sake of convenience, let
us distinguish between two aspects of
mass politics in contemporary Indian
democracy one that involves a contest
over sovereignty with the Indian state
and the other that makes claims on gov-
ernmental authorities over services and
benets. There are indeed territories
and peoples in India that may be de-
scribed as challenging the Indian states
sovereignty over them: the insurgent
movements in Kashmir are a clear exam-
ple, as are the periodic insurgencies in
some of the north-eastern states. The
continued insurgency that has sim-
mered in the forest regions of central In-
dia since the 1970s also has, at least in
the recent phase of the Maoist-led war
on the Indian state, the characteristic of
a contest over sovereignty.
Of course, as many reports from these
regions indicate, the continued insur-
gency has not meant that governmental
agencies have simply disappeared from
the scene. Rather, complex negotiations
take place between the insurgent move-
ments and government agencies over
what services or benets should be
delivered, to whom and through which
agencies, and who should supervise the
operations. These are, I think, fascinating
aspects of politics that affect the daily
lives of millions of people in Kashmir,
Manipur, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand or
Orissa that deserve close study as
i nstances of the overlap of the politics of
sovereignty with the politics of govern-
mentality. But if, in our judgment, the
contest over sovereignty predominates
here, then, when insurgents attack an
army camp or blow up an army truck, or
villagers refuse to disclose where a sus-
pected Maoist may be hiding, or women
and children throw stones at policemen,
we may be right in concluding that G uhas
framework is still relevant in u nder-
standing what is happening.
But outside these relatively marginal-
ised zones, the ordinary stuff of demo-
cratic politics is about constant tussles
of different population groups with the
authorities over the distribution of gov-
ernmental services. I have shown else-
where that this tussle becomes political
because many of the demands cannot
be conceded within the normal rules of
l egal and bureaucratic rationality. The
usual way of accommodating those de-
mands is to declare them as exceptional
cases that have to be dealt with by ad-
ministrative adjustments to the normal
rules without, however, jeopardising
the normative rationality of the legal
structure itself. This is not always easy,
and the justications are often confused
and arbitrary, leading quite often to
conicts between the administrative,
legislative and judicial branches of
government. But a large degree of arbi-
trary political power has made its way
through these practices of democratic
politics into the rational structure of
the equal application of the law to all
citizens as enjoined by the Indian Con-
stitution. The forms of mass politics, in
turn, very often seek the application
of arbitrary and exceptional power in
order to address what various popula-
tion groups think are pressing issues of
justice and fairness.
If one looks at the common techniques
of mass agitation in India today road
blocks, disruption of train services, des-
truction of property, setting re to vehicles,
attacking government ofcials or the po-
lice one would surely nd genealogical
links to older practices resorted to by re-
bellious peasants. But I believe it would
be a mistake to try to understand these
activities of contemporary mass politics
within the theoretical paradigm of peas-
ant insurgency. Just as the relation be-
tween rulers and subjects has chan ged,
so has the formation of the political mass.
I think a theoretical framework such as,
let us say, populism, which des cribes a
process of the temporary and often
fragile aggregation of disparate groups
under a common signier called the
people assembled against a putative
enemy of the people, might be more
appropriate for our purposes. But this is
a new research question that has now
emerged from transformations in the real
domain of politics. It points to e ntirely
new problems about which populist
a ggregations might become effective
and which would fail.
A quite difcult riddle, for instance, is
posed by the recent spate of farmer sui-
cides caused by indebtedness in many
regions of India. Scholars in Subaltern
Studies, along with many other histori-
ans, have analysed in detail the numer-
ous instances of anti-moneylender riots
in late colonial India, from the Deccan
riots of the 1870s to those in Punjab,
U ttar Pradesh and Bengal. In fact, it
would not be an exaggeration to say that
one of the most common responses to
mass i ndebtedness among the peasantry
in most parts of India was a violent
agitation aimed against moneylenders
and landlords. Why is the response now
the suicide of the indebted peasant,
presumably to save his family from the
loss of land? What has changed? As I
said before, the question of the mass-
political subject was posed by Subaltern
Studies, but given the form that ques-
tion has taken today, it cannot be an-
swered any more within the conceptual
framework of that project.
Subaltern, Popular, Vernacular
Let me turn to another area that was one
of the central concerns of Subaltern
Studies but where, I believe, the results
of recent research has thrown up entirely
new topics.
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september 1, 2012 vol xlviI no 35 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 48
The concern with peasant conscious-
ness led many of us in Subaltern Studies
to explore two sets of archives that until
then had not been seriously looked at by
historians of south Asia. One was the
a rchive of the non-canonical, unsophisti-
cated, down market, often not-intended-
for-print, literature of songs, ballads, chap-
books, local newspapers, almanacs and
ephemera of various kinds that had some-
how managed to survive, mostly in private
or small institutional collections (apart
from the quite remarkable Vernacular
Tracts series in the India Ofce Library
in London which came into e xistence
simply because of the legal requirement
of surveillance over the Indian language
press). Guhas essay Chandras Death
was written on the basis of a snippet of a
court deposition excerpted in a compila-
tion on early Bengali letter writing.
Much of this exploration of unconven-
tional stores of evidence was prompted
by our search for sources where the sub-
altern subject might be seen to be repre-
senting himself or herself. The problems
with this rather nave search for subal-
tern subjectivity have been much dis-
cussed since. But our e fforts in this di-
rection soon merged with other projects
to mine the rich d eposits of vernacular
print literatures in the 19th and 20th
centuries. The search for the subaltern
voice led us into the d omain of what has
now come to be called popular culture.
There are several signicant aspects
of this more recent project that need to
be pointed out. First of all, recent re-
searches into the print literature in the
major Indian languages have brought to
the fore the great variety of regional
c ultural formations that emerged in the
19th and 20th centuries and that de-
mand signicant reformulation of the
questions of modernity and nationhood
in south Asia. It is now clear that there
was no unmediated access to an idea of
India or that of Pakistan or Bangladesh
except through the regional linguistic
formation. Further, each regional forma-
tion had its own peculiarities, with re-
gional minority cultures that were e ither
assimilated or sought to be suppressed,
including the varying degrees and forms
of assertion in different r egions by the
non-brahmin and dalit castes. Second, the
rise to prominence of the non-canonical
and unsophisticated varieties of printed
material meant that the focus shifted
away from intellectual or high literary
history to the historical construction of
the national-popular which demanded
entirely different principles of literary
and aesthetic judgment. Third, each
r egional formation was shown to consist
of graded hierarchies ranging from elite
high culture to nationalist modern m iddle-
class culture to popular urban culture to
rural culture, often with blurred bound-
aries and varying distributions of w estern-
isation, urbanity and vernacular m oder-
nity. This was the space where the new
forms of modern mass culture b egan
to be produced through printed texts,
printed visuals, advertising, gramo phone
records and cinema, but the s pecic
e ffects in each regional culture were
o ften quite different.
Cultural History
This is the exciting new space of cultural
history where much scholarly work is
now going on. What has been opened for
theoretical formulation and empirical
study is the category of the popular.
Following Gramsci, the idea of the
p eople-nation was always entailed by
the concept of the subaltern classes. It
was the basis for the description of the
postcolonial state as a dominance with-
out hegemony or passive revolution.
But the description was quite abstract,
because the content of the people in the
people-nation could not be specied ex-
cept as formulaic statements such as the
one provided in the so-called manifesto
in the rst volume of Subaltern Studies
(Guha 1982). I believe we now have a
much richer stock of descriptions of the
domain of the popular in the different
linguistic regions of south Asia in the
last century and a half to enable us to
supply more concrete, nuanced and
chronologically specic accounts of the
formation of the national-popular.
There is yet another area that the
study of popular culture has opened up
whose signicance we were not even
aware of when we embarked on Subal-
tern Studies. This is the domain of the
visual. One set of scholars who opened
up this eld for the study of the national-
popular were lm theorists who refused
to be conned to the rareed world of
art cinema and instead took up the
serious analysis of the popular cinema
in India as an integral aspect of the
political. The complex ways in which
the visual is ent wined with the narrato-
logical in Indias popular cinema in
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PERSPECTIVES
Economic & Political Weekly EPW september 1, 2012 vol xlviI no 35 49
the different languages, leading to
fascinating representations of basic po-
litical elements such as power, hierar-
chy, gender, class, caste, leadership, loy-
alty, honour, etc, has now emerged in
much clearer forms than they were in
the early 1980s. Alongside this has
emerged the new scholarship on visual
culture which has put together an archive
of hitherto ignored material such as pop-
ular prints, calendars, book illustrations,
advertisements, studio photographs, etc,
that e njoy enormous currency in the
popular domain in a country where most
people do not read books or newspa-
pers, but which were never seriously
considered as sources for the writing of
history. Now it is being argued that
these visual sources, if properly read,
might lead to the writing of a political
history of the popular in south Asia that
would not simply be illustrative of, but
in fact different from, the history writ-
ten on the basis of conventional textual
sources. Much work needs to be done
before this radical proposition can be
persuasively established. But it can hardly
be denied that the means of visual com-
munication must be given an autono-
mous status in the study of the domain
of the popular, especially in a country
where universal literacy is still a long
way from being achieved.
To take this point a step further, we
must also note the more recent trend in
several disciplines to move away from
texts to the study of practices. Led by
anthropologists, this move highlights
the autonomous status of embodied or
institutional practices whose signicance
cannot simply be read off texts describing
the underlying concepts. Thus, religious
ritual is not necessarily an instantiation
of a theological concept or dogma; the
practice may be performed without the
subject subscribing to, or perhaps even
being aware of, the underlying religious
concept. This approach has far-reaching
implications for the study of such major
questions as popular culture, political
ceremonies, public and private religion,
gender relations, sporting acti vities,
violence, and so on, and much new work
is being done that demands a fresh look
at topics that were once c onsidered dead
and buried. Subaltern Studies was one
of the forces that shifted the attention of
historians away from i ntellectual history
to ethnography. Now ethnographic studies
are no longer c oncerned with uncover-
ing the implicit conceptual structures
that supposedly underlie the practical
activities of people who do not produce
large bodies of texts of their own, but
rather seek to understand embodied
practices as activities that people carry
out for their own sake. Once again, the old
conceptual structure of Subaltern Studies
has become inadequate for the purpose.
Conclusions
There is a price that has to be paid for
this shift to the ethnographic, the practi-
cal, the everyday and the local. Shahid
Amin (2011) has often complained about
subaltern histories that do not travel
well. It is undoubtedly true that the
weaving of a local historical narrative
with detailed ethnographic description
of local practices requires immersion in
a seemingly bottomless pool of names,
places and events that are unlikely to be
familiar to readers outside the immedi-
ate geographical region. This was al-
ways the problem with anthropological
monographs. The difculty was circum-
vented by establishing strong connec-
tions between the ethnographic account
and the relevant conceptual formations
or theoretical debates in the discipline:
in the end, the theory predominated. It
is more difcult to achieve the same re-
sult when the main modality of the work
is the narrative ow of history. But then,
we should remember that if history stu-
dents all over the world could read about
daily life in a single village in the French
province of Languedoc in the 14th
c entury or about the mental world of a
solitary Italian miller in the 16th century,
then in principle there is no r eason why
they should not do the same with a book
about subaltern life in a village or small
town in south Asia.
The challenge is to devise appropriate
forms of writing that will preserve the
integrity of the study as well as make it
accessible outside the region. The proof
of the research is in the writing. It is even
possible that the task has been made
easier by the emergence of subaltern
global networks that convey images and
stories, ceremonies and cults, and objects
and practices, from one part of the
world to another without going through
the sanctied channels sponsored by
global corporations or governmental
agencies. Future historians of subaltern
life in south Asia may learn something
from the way migrants from the region
carry stories back and forth between
their natal homes and places of domi-
cile, using the full panoply of modern
technologies of communication, switch-
ing and mixing languages and media,
and making sense of as well as enrich-
ing the diverse worlds they inhabit. In
some ways, that may be more than
what we historians have managed to
accomplish so far.
As I said at the beginning, this is not
an elegy. Even if the specic project
called Subaltern Studies begun 30 years
ago has run its course, it has managed to
scatter, reinvent and insert itself in sev-
eral subsequent projects. The questions
it asked have now taken other forms; to
answer them, it is necessary to craft new
theoretical concepts. Subaltern Studies
was a product of its time; another time
calls for other projects.
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